VEMA Anthology

Appearing below are articles pertaining to abstract artist Veron Ennis, her studio, Veron Ennis Modern Art (VEMA) and the art and art movements in which she is involved.

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British Vogue Magazine featuring Veron Ennis’ ‘Heli Pass’ in its coveted ‘Vogue’s Gallery’ (12-13-14)

Veron Ennis has been included as a featured artist in the coveted “Vogue’s Gallery” section of British Vogue Magazine this January. The magazine hit the shelves on December 8 and is available for instant download on iPad.

“Contemporary modern painter Veron Ennis, featured recently in Florida Contemporary at The Baker Museum, creates on the edge of trend and at the height of fine art,” Vogue notes. “She paints vibrant abstracts pulsing with energetic complexity. More at veronennis.com or veron.ennis@gmail.com.”

The painting featured in the magazine, Hexi Pass, was purchased by a collector in South Beach, Miami, Florida earlier this month.

Veron Ennis is a Fort Myers-based modernist painter concerned with the intimate characteristics of the layered painted medium, the language of color, and the interplay between precision and chance application. Using an underlying grid format, she utilizes an assortment of media to create her paintings, including water-based paints, acrylics, polymer-based grounds, cotton rag paper, raw canvas and wood panel. “I discovered early on that oils are not my medium. “The cost, drying times and fumes interfere with what I want to do,” Ennis relates. But acrylics solve all of her technical questions and empower her to express herself within the confines of her self-imposed creative time constraints. Look forward to an upcoming exhibit of Veron’s work at HW Gallery in Naples, Florida on January 30, 2015

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Learn basics of abstract composition at the Alliance from OPT/aleaotoric expert Veron Ennis (08-30-14)

Local OPT and aleatoric abstract artist Veron Ennis plans to be on the other side of the easel on September 9. That’s when she will teach a class in basic abstract composition for students 16 and up at the Lee County Alliance for the Arts.

Basic Abstract Composition will focus on the importance of composition in abstract art. Balancing a composition through the use of energized tension, abstract work becomes a success. Experimenting with collage, line-work, watercolor and finally acrylic paint, students will learn the basics of composing an abstract piece of art. The basic concepts of positive and negative space, color relationships, shapes and forms and the use of direction in a composition are concepts that can be used in all art genres. Students will complete one collage, at least one ink and watercolor and one final acrylic painting.

The supply list for this course includes:

• at least 2 magazines from which to cut shapes;
• a Glue Stick;
• 2 sheets of standard white card stock 8.5×11” (Stiff white paper);
• A Black Archival Pen;
• 25 sheets of standard white printer paper;
• 3 to 5 sheets of medium to large watercolor paper;
• basic set of watercolor paint;
• small paint brush;
• medium flat paint brush;
• one medium to large canvas board;
• basic set of acrylic paints;
• any tools that look interesting, such as trowels, squiggies, palette knives, rakes, hair brush (not required but is fun);
• one roll of artist’s tape (can be found at Michaels and most art supply stores);
• anything you can trace that is a cool and interesting shape, or even a basic shape;
• Exacto Knife; and
• palette for mixing paint.

The class takes place from 6-8 p.m. on September 9. Tuition is $105 for members and $135 for non-members. There is only room for 16 students; there must be five to hold the class. To enroll, please click here. For more on Veron Ennis, please click here.

The Alliance for the Art is located at 10099 McGregor Boulevard, just south of the intersection of McGregor and Colonial Boulevard.

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VEMA’s Veron Ennis included in Creative Capital Foundation professional development workshop (07-04-14)

Abstract artist and VEMA founder Veron Ennis was recently awarded the honor of participating in the Creative Capital Foundation Professional Development Program along with 24 other extremely talented artists from the State of Florida. Creative Capital is the leader in professional development for artists and the only national organization that has made a long-term commitment to artists’ professional development. Thanks to the efforts and funding from The Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Citizens for Florida Arts, Veron is now looking forward to some major projects and exciting opportunities.

Veron is represented by HW Gallery in Naples, RC2 Gallery in Boca Raton, and Von Fraunberg Gallery in Düsseldorf. Veron also recently joined the Union Artist Studios located in the Edwards Building on the campus of the Alliance for the Arts in Fort Myers.

“The summer is winding up to its hottest hours and I’m enjoying my time in the new studio at VEMA producing work for the upcoming winter season,” Ennis reports. “I’ve loved the Art Talks we’ve hosted with the Union Artist Studios and I look forward to hosting them bi-monthly for our incredible community of artists and art patrons”

In addition to the foregoing venues, Veron’s recently-completed Hexi Pass is on view during the month of July at the newly-open Tincture Gallery on Dean Street in downtown Fort Myers.

Veron Ennis is a Fort Myers-based modernist painter concerned with the intimate characteristics of the layered painted medium, the language of color, and the interplay between precision and chance application. Using an underlying grid format, she utilizes an assortment of media to create her paintings, including water-based paints, acrylics, polymer-based grounds, cotton rag paper, raw canvas and wood panel. Her work can be divided into three series, Paper Milk, Chroma Tone and Transference.

For more information, please telephone Veron Ennis at 239-849-7772 or email her at veron.ennis@gmail.com

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Alliance’s inaugural aleatoric exhibition helps artists and public understand new art movement (05-15-14)

When was the last time you laid on your back and just watched the clouds scurry by? If you’re like most cloud watchers, you probably whiled away an hour or two picking out faces, dogs, cats and other animate and inanimate shapes in the changing celestial landscape high overhead. And if you’ve ever engaged in creative cloud scanning, you possess the keys to understanding aleatoric art. During the month of May the Alliance for the Arts is featuring the inaugural gallery show of work by members of the avant-garde Movement of Aleatoric Modern Artists, or MAMA. Aleatoric Art in the 21st Century includes works in a variety of disciplines, all with one thing in common—their collaboration with nature, chance and the laws that govern the universe.

Fine art photographer J. Coleman Miller is quick to point out that clouds didn’t serve as his entry point into aleatoric art. “I was taking photographs of a coy pond for a website project, and saw a monster in the ripples of water,” Jamie fondly recalls. “It was one of those accidental images that you see in a rock formation, the grain of a piece of wood or wisp of curling smoke.” Not long after, his son was tasked with creating an image-based blog for school and the duo began surfing the web for other accidental images. “That was in 2008 and by the following year, we had the names of 25 artists who were creating art from chance images.”

Jamie and his son contacted those artists, got their permission and included their imagery on what has become AleatoricArt.com. Today, they’ve identified some 50 artists worldwide who are working in the field.

As a matter of definition, aleatoric art includes any composition that depends upon chance, random accident or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from academic formula and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind. “There are various ancient traditions of Japanese and Chinese artists employing aleatoric methods, many of whom were influenced by the concepts of Taoism and Zen Buddhism,” MAMA’s website explains. “In the West, precedents can be found among the best artists of ancient Greece, and also later among many of the artists of the Italian Renaissance, leading up to the Dadaists of the early 20th Century.”

It is actually man who artificially seeks to impose rules on nature in his ongoing effort to understand and control himself and his environment. “But when you look out into a dense fecund jungle or a starry sky, you don’t see those rules being followed to the letter,” remarks Ray Carbarga in Aleatoric Art in the 21st Century, the tome from which the eponymous exhibition takes its name. “What you see is a random chaos that seems to arbitrarily decide to order itself and create specific formations that repeat themselves with startling accuracy and consistency. You see … evolution … decay … and spontaneous coalescence … all bound to certain rules just as children in a 3rd grade art class are told that they must color within the lines. The aleatoric artist lets these rules govern or influence the outcome of his work.”

What Miller and Carbarga are both alluding to is a give-and-take process in which the aleatoric artist vacillates between surrendering to the unconscious or a higher power and consciously seeking to impose his or her will or structure on the evolving composition or sculpture. But it’s not easy to strike the appropriate balance between these opposing poles and it takes a certain level of intellectual and visceral bravery to relinquish partial control of the creative process to the hands of fate, the laws of physics and the continuum of perpetual chaos which prevails by design over our entire universe.

“By learning to value and preserve that which we can never own, to respond and yield to that which we can never predict and to respect and trust that which we can never control, the aleatoric artist inherits the divine principle of acceptance, the creative process becomes a cooperative collaboration with the forces that govern the universe, and thus the aleatoric artist transcends the limitations of the mind and body to reach artistic plateaus previously unattainable,” MAMA’s website amplifies.

Following these principles himself, Miller’s photography portrays “eerie aqueous faces full of angst and passion hidden within diaphanous veils of liquid flesh, tortured spirits fully embroiled in gaseous infernos, nebulous glacial prehistoria infected with fractal reflections and vitreous pathogens and sultry vaporous nymphs smoldering in the molten pools of aleatoric magma from which the earliest signs of art emerged.” He creates these mysterious images with nothing but a digital camera and moving water. But it would be incongruous to define the images you will see in his surrealist iconography. It’s up to each viewer to find the images and meanings that resonate with him or her.

“That’s what happened when seven of us exhibited in Aqua Miami at ArtBasel. Since we weren’t presenting pictures of something, we had no idea what was going to happen. But our booth was packed the whole time. We all cloud watch. We all find shapes in waves at the beach. There’s something primordial inside us that causes us to find something beautiful that we recognize in nature.”

And that’s the allure of Aleatoric Art in the 21st Century.

Other MAMA artists participating in Aleatoric Art in the 21st Century include (alphabetically) Ray Cabarga (California), Cristine Cambrea (Florida), Tsvetan Chetashki (Bulgaria), Veron Ennis (Florida), Don Frost (Ontario), Reed Ghazala (Ohio), Beth Holt (Netherlands), Newel Hunter (Washington State), Ted Lincoln (Florida), Anick Morel (Canada), Allan Rodewald (Texas), Stoffel de Roover (Montreal), Mark Stock (Massachusetts), Art Venti (California), and Alex Volborth (1925-2009, Montana).

Aleatoric Art in the 21st Century remains on display until 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 24, and will be followed by the 28th Annual All Florida Juried Exhibit, which opens with a reception from 5:00-7:30 p.m. on Friday, May 30. For more information about the exhibits, or about all of the things happening at the Alliance, please visit ArtInLee.org or call 239-939-2787.

The Alliance campus and galleries are open to the public from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on Saturdays. Both are located at 10091 McGregor Boulevard just south of Colonial Boulevard in Fort Myers. Visit www.artinlee.org for additional details.

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First-ever ‘aleatoric’ art exhibition opens at Alliance for the Arts (04-07-14)

On Friday, May 2, 2014 the first-ever dedicated gallery show featuring work by members of the Movement of Aleatoric Modern Artists or MAMA opened at the Lee County Alliance for the Arts. Curated by local aleatoric artist Veron Ennis, the exhibition included work in a variety of disciplines by 15 of MAMA’s top artists: Ray Cabarga (California), Cristine Cambrea (Florida), Tsvetan Chetashki (Bulgaria), Don Frost (Ontario), Reed Ghazala (Ohio), Beth Holt (Netherlands), Newel Hunter (Washington State), Ted Lincoln (Florida), J Coleman Miller (Texas), Anick Morel (Canada), Allan Rodewald (Texas), Stoffel de Roover (Montreal), Mark Stock (Massachusetts), Art Venti (California), Alex Volborth (1925-2009, Montana), and, of course, Ennis herself.

Aleatoric art refers to works in which an element of uncertainty is intentionally incorporated into the concept during the course of its creation. The DADAists of the early 20th century, for example, chose to entrust partial control of their creative processes to fate, the laws of physics and the continuum of perpetual chaos which prevails by design over our entire universe. Many other artists and schools of art did likewise.

“By learning to value and preserve that which we can never own, to respond and yield to that which we can never predict, and to respect and trust that which we can never control, the aleatoric artist inherits the divine principle of acceptance, and the creative process becomes a cooperative collaboration between the artist’s deliberate intentions and the unpredictable hands of fate,” notes Ennis, who is one of the movement’s earliest members. “Thus, the aleatoric artist gambles, and either fails or transcends the limitations of the mind and body to reach artistic plateaus previously unattainable.”

MAMA explains it like this on its website: “The Movement of Aleatoric Modern Artists is a hand-picked assemblage of 48 extraordinary painters, sculptors, photographers and craftspeople representing an emerging ‘period’ in art which has spontaneously occurred all over the world with uncanny simultaneity. In response to society’s apathy toward the undermining of our planet’s ecological balance by the ever-advancing technology of industry, every member of our movement has discovered a unique artistic approach that is philosophically, spiritually, and/or functionally aligned with nature. Each artist has selflessly devoted his/her talents to advocating the virtues of our Mother Earth and discovering new ways of collaborating with her design to produce a body of work greater than our abilities alone would allow.”

MAMA’s members were chosen for their willingness to “roll the dice.” In fact, the meaning of the root word “alea” in aleatoric is to take a faithful exploratory leap into the vast unknown, in this case, the future of fine art. (You can read more about MAMA’s leading edge artists at http://thedice.smugmug.com/Art/LCAA-2014-ARTISTS.)

“Our art community is young, eager and energetic, and I’m confident that our artists will connect with the pieces in this exhibition and be inspired to explore aleatoric principles in their own work,” said Ennis, who is intimately familiar with the local art market not only as an exhibiting contemporary modernist, but as an art journalist and critic who contributes regularly to ART DISTRICTS magazine, Times of the Islands, RSW Living, Bonita & Estero, Gulf & Main, and Gulfshore Life magazines. The exhibit ran through May 23.

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